In his Jan. 13 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, secretary
of state nominee Rex Tillerson made an extraordinary
comment concerning China’s activities in the hotly disputed South China
Sea.

The United States, he said, must “send a clear signal that, first, the
island-building stops,” adding that Beijing’s “access to the those
islands is not going to be allowed.”

Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, repeated the threat on Jan. 24.

Sometimes it’s hard to sift the real from the magical in the Trump administration,
and bombast appears to be the default strategy of the day. But people should
be clear about what would happen if the U.S. actually tries to blockade China
from supplying its forces constructing airfields and radar facilities on the
Spratly and Paracel islands.

It would be an act of war.

While Beijing’s Foreign Ministry initially reacted cautiously to the comment,
Chinese newspapers have been far less
diplomatic. The nationalist Global Times warned of a “large-scale
war” if the US followed through on its threat, and the China Daily
cautioned that a blockade could lead to a “devastating confrontation between
China and the US”

Independent observers agree. “It is very difficult to imagine the means
by which the United States could prevent China from accessing these artificial
islands without provoking some kind of confrontation,” says Rory
Medcalf, head of Australia’s National Security College. And such a confrontation,
says Carlyle Thayer of the University of New South Wales, “could quickly
develop into an armed conflict.”

Last summer, China’s commander of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, Wu
Shengli, told US Admiral John Richardson that “we will never stop
our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway.” Nansha is China’s name
for the Spratlys. Two weeks later, Chang
Wanquan, China’s Defense Minister, said Beijing is preparing for a “people’s
war at sea.”

The Roots of China’s Anxiety

A certain amount of this is posturing by two powerful countries in competition
for markets and influence, but Tillerson’s statement didn’t come out of
the blue.

In fact, the US is in the middle of a major military buildup – the Obama
administration’s “Asia Pivot” in the Pacific. American bases in
Okinawa, Japan, and Guam have been beefed up, and for the first time since World
War II, US Marines have been deployed in Australia. Last March, the US sent
B-2
nuclear-capable strategic stealth bombers to join them.

There is no question that China has been aggressive about claiming sovereignty
over small islands and reefs in the South China Sea, even after the Permanent
Court of Arbitration at The Hague rejected Beijing’s claims. But if a military
confrontation is to be avoided, it’s important to try to understand what’s
behind China’s behavior.

The current crisis has its roots in a tense standoff between Beijing and Taiwan
in late 1996. China was angered that Washington had granted a visa to Taiwan’s
president, Lee Teng-hui, calling it a violation of the 1979 US“one-China”
policy that recognized Beijing and downgraded relations with Taiwan to “unofficial.”

Beijing responded to the visa uproar by firing missiles near a small Taiwan-controlled
island and moving some military forces up to the mainland coast facing the island.
However, there was never any danger that China would actually attack Taiwan.
Even if it wanted to, it didn’t have the means to do so.

Instead of letting things cool off, however, the Clinton administration escalated
the conflict and sent two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region, the
USS Nimitz and USS Independence. The Nimitz and its escorts sailed through the
Taiwan Straits between the island and the mainland, and there was nothing that
China could do about it.

The carriers deeply alarmed Beijing, because the regions just north of Taiwan
in the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea were the jumping off points for 19th
and 20th century invasions by western colonialists and the Japanese.

The Straits crisis led to a radical remaking of China’s military, which had
long relied on massive land forces. Instead, China adopted a strategy called
“Area Denial” that would allow Beijing to control the waters surrounding
its coast, in particular the East and South China seas. That not only required
retooling of its armed forces – from land armies to naval and air power – it
required a ring of bases that would keep potential enemies at arm’s length and
also allow Chinese submarines to enter the Pacific and Indian oceans undetected.

Reaching from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in the north to the Malay Peninsula
in the south, this so-called “first island chain” is Beijing’s primary
defense line.

China is particularly vulnerable to a naval blockade. Some 80 percent of its
energy supplies traverse the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, moving through
narrow choke points like the Malacca Straits between Indonesia and Malaysia,
the Bab al Mandab Straits controlling the Red Sea, and the Straits of Hormuz
into the Persian Gulf.

All of those passages are controlled by the US or countries like India and
Indonesia with close
ties to Washington.

In 2013, China claimed it had historic rights to the region and issued its
now famous “nine-dash line” map that embraced the Paracels and Spratly
island chains – and 85 percent of the South China Sea. It was this nine-dash
line that the Hague tribunal rejected, because it found no historical basis
for China’s claim, and because there were overlapping assertions by Taiwan,
Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines.

There are, of course, economic considerations as well. The region is rich in
oil, gas and fish, but the primary concern for China is security. The Chinese
haven’t interfered with commercial ship traffic in the territory they
claim, although they’ve applied on-again, off-again restrictions on fishing
and energy explorations. China initially prevented Filipino fishermen from exploiting
some reefs, and then allowed it. It’s been more aggressive with Vietnam
in the Paracels.

Stirring the Pot

Rather than trying to assuage China’s paranoia, the US made things worse by
adopting a military strategy to checkmate “Area Denial.”

Called “Air/Sea
Battle” – later renamed “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver
in the Global Commons” – Air/Sea Battle envisions attacking China’s navy,
air force, radar facilities, and command centers with air and naval power. Missiles
would be used to take out targets deep into Chinese territory.

China’s recent seizure of a US underwater drone off the Philippines is
part of an ongoing chess game in the region. The drone was almost certainly
mapping sea floor bottoms and collecting data that would allow the US to track
Chinese
submarines, including those armed with nuclear missiles. While the heist
was a provocative thing to do – it was seized right under the nose of an
unarmed US Navy ship – it’s a reflection of how nervous the Chinese
are about their vulnerability to Air/Sea Battle.

China’s leaders “have good reason to worry about this emerging US naval
strategy [use of undersea drones] against China in East Asia,” Li Mingjiang,
a China expert at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore,
told the Financial Times. “If this strategy becomes reality,
it could be quite detrimental to China’s national security.”

Washington charges that the Chinese are playing the bully with small countries
like Vietnam and the Philippines, and there is some truth to that charge. China
has been throwing its weight around with several nations in Southeast Asia.
But it also true that the Chinese have a lot of evidence that the Americans
are gunning for them.

The US has some 400
military bases surrounding China and is deploying antiballistic missiles
in South Korea and Japan, ostensibly to guard against North Korean nuclear weapons.
But the interceptors could also down Chinese missiles, posing a threat to Beijing’s
nuclear deterrence.

While Air/Sea Battle does not envision using nuclear weapons, it could still
lead to a nuclear war. It would be very difficult to figure out whether missiles
were targeting command centers or China’s nukes. Under the stricture “use
them or lose them” the Chinese might fear their missiles were endangered
and launch them.

The last thing one wants to do with a nuclear-armed power is make it guess.

Superpower Conflict

The Trump administration has opened a broad front on China, questioning the
“one China” policy, accusing Beijing of being in cahoots with Islamic
terrorists, and threatening a trade war.

The first would upend more than 30 years of diplomacy, the second is bizarre
– if anything, China is overly aggressive in suppressing terrorism in its western
Xinjiang Province – and the third makes no sense.

China is the US’s major trading partner and holds $1.24 trillion in US treasury
bonds. While Trump charges that the Chinese have hollowed out the American economy
by undermining its industrial base with cheap labor and goods, China didn’t
force Apple or General Motors to pull up stakes and decamp elsewhere. Capital
goes where wages are low and unions are weak.

A trade war would hurt China, but it would also hurt
the US and the global economy as well.

When Trump says he wants to make America great again, what he really means
is that he wants to go back to that post-World War II period when the US dominated
much of the globe with a combination of economic strength and military power.
But that era is gone, and dreams of a unipolar world run by Washington are a
hallucination.

According to the
CIA, “by 2030 Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined
in terms of global power based on GDP, population size, military spending and
technological investments.” By 2025, two-thirds of the world will live
in Asia, 7 percent in Europe and 5 percent in the US Those are the demographics
of eclipse.

If Trump starts a trade war, he will find little support among America’s allies.
China is the number one trading partner for Japan, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam,
and India, and the third largest for Indonesia and the Philippines. Over the
past year, a number of countries like Thailand, Malaysia,
and the Philippines
have also distanced themselves from Washington and moved closer to China. When
President Obama tried to get US allies not to sign on to China’s new Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank, they ignored
him.

But the decline of US influence has a dangerous side. Washington may not be
able to dictate the world’s economy, but it has immense military power. Chinese
military expert Yang
Chengjun says “China does not stir up troubles, but we are not afraid
of them when they come.”

They should be. For all its modernization, China is no match for the US However,
defeating China is far beyond Washington’s capacity. The only wars the US has
“won” since 1945 are Grenada and Panama.

Nonetheless, such a clash would be catastrophic. It would torpedo global trade,
inflict trillions of dollars of damage on each side, and the odds are distressingly
high that the war could go nuclear.

US allies in the region should demand that the Trump administration back off
any consideration of a blockade. Australia has already told Washington it will
not take part in any such action. The US should also do more than rename Air/Sea
Battle – it should junk the entire strategy. The East and South China seas
are not national security issues
for the US, but they are for China.

And China should realize that, while it has the right to security, trotting
out ancient dynastic maps to lay claim to vast areas bordering scores of countries
does nothing but alienate its neighbors and give the US an excuse to interfere
in affairs thousands of miles from its own territory.